Martin Klimas is no stranger to capturing things as they’re in the process of being smashed to bits.

His most recent series takes the same high-speed “explosion” approach, only the subject has changed from porcelain figures —which by nature smash up fairly easily— to flowers… a significantly less brittle subject.

The series is called Rapid Bloom and those flowers aren’t fake or Photoshopped in any way. No, those are actual flowers breaking apart into petal shards courtesy of a little bit of liquid nitrogen and some compressed air.

Once dipped in liquid nitrogen, the flowers would turn as fragile as very thin egg shells. All it took after that was a blast from the air gun placed behind the flowers to create a photo that shows the flower “blooming” so rapidly that the more accurate word for it is “exploding.”